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12/31/10

Just as the AFOL community patted themselves on their collective backs for cracking the Series 3 dot codes, it is turning out that the system isn't always reliable.

Victor wrote to let me know that even with the cheat sheet in hand, he felt the codes didn't always get the job done (the baseball player codes didn't seem to be terribly accurate). I'm posting an improved cheat sheet above (click the image for a larger view) from phamjod which originally appeared on FBTB. This adds the placement of the creases on the bag to aid identification. This sheet seems to be 'better', but you may still face challenges. I'll work to update the link in the guides, but at least you will have this for now.

This has only been confirmed for the US to date. A cheat sheet for the UK/EU has not materialized to the best of my knowledge.

With January 1st, the official launch date of Series 3, a day away, I hope this will help you find the figures you are looking for.

Remember that if you question the dots on your package, you can always try to 'feel it out' through the bag.

8 comments:

Yes. I recently purchased a few off of Bricklink, and instead of getting "Street Punks", the sealed packaged ended up being "Hula Girls". I looked at the packages to check the dots, and I could see where the vendor made the mistake...the dots on the right side were almost invisible while the patterns on the left side are close enough to be misread. The vendor was of course great about it and is sending me replacements, but I feel pretty bad opening up his sealed packages. This whole attempt on Lego's part to limit certain figures with blind packaging is a bit annoying really. I've never been a fan of trying to force value on certain figures by short-packing them.

I just want to say I recently purchased a bag purely be feel (didn't have a cheat sheet on me and my son spotted 2 boxes at Target!). I felt something long and skinny so was hoping it was the fisherman, and it was! However once getting home and looking up the cheat sheets online, I am confused!!!

The fisherman I just bought, does NOT have the dots in the pattern shown on all the cheat sheets I've found online tonight. In fact the first 2 dots are positioned more like the "space cyborg" and the 3rd dot is positioned sort of like "tribal chief" but a little higher and to the left more.

Has LEGO outsmarted us?? Maybe not ALL the bags are going to correspond to the current cheat sheets, perhaps that was the "first batch?" I don't know if this cheat sheet is worth trying to go by. I wonder if anyone else will post about this.

For fisherman #2, I'm bringing bag #1 back with me but I don't have a lot of $$$ to spend and wanted to get a couple of other, particular ones :{

P.S. Am I the only one who thinks LEGO is a completely GREEDY company how much they charge for plastic?!? My younger son got 2 Lego Duplo "Cars" sets for x-mas, $50 and after taking them out of the packaging and assembling, they are soooo small! They always do that, make the packaging and the picture on the packaging portray the set as being MUCH bigger than it actually is, and the kids are usually disappointed :{

@Alice - You may be on to something with the dots changing per batch. The reason I suggest this is that in the UK the ratios of Fishermen in each case were upped to three per case, instead of the two per case we witnessed here in the US.

I'll post a question here to readers to see if there might be something to this...

Sorry I posted so much the other time lol... well my 9yr. old son and I went to Target and we did bring the dot "cheat sheet" which helped some, but we still needed to feel around the bags- my son is great at this ;) We did great, only 1 mistake. I think LEGO may eliminate ANY way to tell in the future, so we may just go by feel since he proved to be so accurate ;)

The archer was nothing like the dot code btw, my son could feel the crossbow that's how we identified it.

Thank you so much for this sheet! Seems like you've put a lot of effort in it. I find it very useful.Most of the times it's fairly easy to determine the figure accurately only with the dots. Still I recommend to always double check the packages by feel to make sure.